Prior art systems and methods for designing and laying out a pipeline require the creation of tedious two-dimensional hand-drawn plan diagrams using manual surveys of the terrain with or without the assistance of satellite positioning systems, such as the Global Positioning System (“GPS”). These methods are cumbersome, slow, and result in inaccuracies that raise the cost of designing and physically laying out a pipeline due to the fact that the plans could not effectively be used to accurately determine the amount of pipe needed or correctly identify the location and size of pipe bends required.
Some prior art systems and methodologies took the approach of marrying together a hand-drawn plan view 2D pipeline path with a corresponding hand-drawn profile view 2D pipeline path to determine the overall pipeline path in 3D. This technique typically results in a complex 3D pipeline path which often contains curves which were non-planar. Non-planar curves require pipe bends where the pipe curves radially in both the plan view and the profile view thereby defining a complex twisting curve in 3D. These types of curves cannot be manufactured using conventional pipe bending machines.
Furthermore, the inaccuracies and delays inherent in determining a pipeline design and layout using the prior art methods result in increased time and cost for a particular pipeline job due to one or more of ordering too much or too little raw pipe, requiring expensive exotic pipe bends that typically cannot be done in the field, an inability to minimize the number of bends, generating incorrect bending instructions from the design drawings, digging ditches that are too shallow or off-course, etc.
Accordingly, there is a need for a faster, more efficient, reliable, and more accurate pipeline design and layout system rather than relying on rules of thumb, guesswork, and/or general experience. Additionally, there is a need for a system, method, and software embodied on a non-transitory machine-readable medium that can receive GPS input information from a construction site, design the layout and pipeline fabrication details from the GPS input information, and then provide GPS and pipeline construction output information to be used in the field to construct the pipeline so that the installation and the fabrication of the pipe matches the ditch line to be excavated.